Day 65 - Learning to love ourselves

"To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are." - Anne Lamott

This really hits me where I live. So much so, that I want to expound upon it briefly. I just love the message in this quote from a frequent contributor over at "O," The Oprah Magazine.

As students, we constantly seek, trying to find or reinvent ourselves. Rarely a week goes by that I don't hear a fellow student talking about how his or her life is going to "start" after graduation. One of the great things about being a student (again) later in life is knowing that this is untrue. Hopefully, by now I've fully learned that sometimes slowing down, taking time to smell the roses, is the most necessary course of action. Life didn't start for me after graduating from college the first time so why would now be any different? And then, I remember, this is life.

It's important to stop every now and then to take stock of your life, remembering to live more in the now. There is no waiting for anything to start; there is only the wasting of precious time. This life is whatever we choose to make of it. And, as Einstein taught long ago, "everything in the future and everything in the past is right here now."

Whether you are a student in college or just a student of life, and regardless of age or status, something in your life is always changing, beginning or ending. Something always will be. In the center of all that, you find your true identity. You - wonderful, funny, caring, selfish, unthinking, striving, adorable and screwed up, you. When the tears and the facade are washed away, they reveal your true self, the self you expose by cleaning the very "pipes of your soul" by dealing once and for all with your rage and grief. The self that is reflected every time you see the love in your best friend's eyes. The self that is revealed in the masculine and feminine energy you emanate - an energy that is peculiarly and uniquely all your own. You are perfect as you are. You know that, right?

Please forgive me for waxing sentimental. Sometimes you just need to hear the words in order to reactivate the will.

Being part of an education is being part of an awakening. I wish you an awakening filled with grace, and the stamina you'll need when the going gets tough.